Calcio: A History of Italian Football. John Foot

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       CHAPTER 4 Teams and Cities: Milan, Rome, Genoa, Florence, Naples

      Milan. Moral Capital and Football Capital

      For the whole of the 1960s, the world’s football capital was Milan. AC Milan and Internazionale had each won two European Cups in that decade, whilst Inter also lost another final. Domestically, the two Milanese clubs dominated the championship. Inter won three scudetti, and came second four times in ten years, Milan came first twice, and second twice. The ‘moral capital’ was also the key city in Italy in the 1960s. As the nation went through an unprecedented period of development and growth – the ‘economic miracle’ – Milan was the powerhouse of the ‘great transformation’. Hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants flooded into the city, finding work in the vast factories on the urban fringe – Alfa Romeo, Innocenti (who made the Lambretta scooter), Pirelli, Zanussi.

      Despite the many stories in circulation, we still have no clear idea as to the reasons behind support for Milan or Inter, who have played in the same stadium since the 1940s.¹ Legend has it that Inter fans were originally more well-to-do, whilst Milan fans were drawn from the city’s large industrial working class. There is no evidence to support this claim, and research on the contemporary fan-bases of the two clubs has found little social difference between them. Politics is also not a dividing characteristic – Inter have a hard-core of right-wing fans, but many left-wing supporters. Milan’s curva has never ceded to the right, whilst their president and owner, Silvio Berlusconi, is certainly not on the left. There are no Inter and Milan zones in the city. Support was more a question of the family into which you were born – and when you were born. Inter became very popular during the period of the Great Inter in the 1950s and 1960s, Milan recruited millions of new fans during its triumphal 1990s.

      Internazionale

      Inter’s successes over the 100 or so years of Italian football can be concentrated into three ‘cycles’ of victories. After sporadic success in the early part of the twentieth century legendary striker Giuseppe Meazza inspired the team to two championships in three years in the late 1930s. A further two championships followed under the defensive management of Alfredo Foni in the early 1950s. However, the myth of Inter – its national fan-base, rivalled only by Milan and Juventus – was born in the 1960s, with the hyperbolic management of Helenio Herrera and thanks to the largesse of president Angelo Moratti. Herrera was a personality so bizarre, strong and successful that he was to dominate the game, and the sports media, for nearly ten years. This was the Great Inter, a team ‘touched by the hand of God’.²

      Great Inter (Grande Inter)

      In Nanni Moretti’s hilarious coming-of-age satire, Ecce Bombo (1978), a group of students mope around Rome looking for a meaning in life. They try group therapy and politics, they experiment with alternative lifestyles. Nothing works. They stay up all night to watch the sunrise, only to find that their car is facing the wrong way. At one point in the film, some of the students study half-heartedly for a university exam. They are attempting to learn the names of the presidents of the Italian Republic since 1946. The list starts out correctly: ‘De Nicola’, but then the three students all repeat a different set of names, like a mantra: Burgnich, Facchetti, Bedin, Guarnieri, Picchi, Jair, Mazzola, Domenghini, Suarez, Corso: The Great Inter.

      Inter’s teams of the 1960s were built around an unlikely alliance between a self-made oil billionaire from a small town near Varese in Lombardy – Moratti – and an Argentinian-born Spanish-Moroccan manager who had made his name with Barcelona – Herrera. Together, and not without furious arguments, these two constructed a formidable side. They also revolutionized calcio in other ways, institutionalizing rigid, almost militaristic training regimes, organizing fans into travelling armies and bringing in a style of play that combined catenaccio defence with rapid and beautiful counter-attacking. All this was achieved with the luxury of a mercurial and lazy genius in midfield – Mario Corso. Herrera was the first modern manager, a superstar whose pay matched his fame. After his departure in 1967, Inter won very little, picking up a mere three scudetti over the next 37 years: a disaster for a club of their standing. No wonder that nostalgia about that glorious period of success is so strong amongst the generation of fans who grew up with that team. Inter’s terrible run came to an end in unexpected fashion in 2006–7, when the calciopoli scandals saw the club win two championships in a year, the first of which was only thanks to the top two teams being docked points retrospectively.

      Not so Great Inter. You Never Win! The psychodrama of the Interisti since 1989

      4.5.2002. Sto ancora godendo, ‘4.5.2002. I’m still enjoying it’

      Juventus banner, Juventus-Inter, 2004